Last week I attended RubyFuza: Africa's Premier Ruby Conference. Since I'm still very new to Ruby, and only really work with it in the content of Rails, some of the talks went over my head in terms of technical content. The conference as a whole as great, though: it was well-organised and had a diverse range of topics.
Something mentioned several times was the amazing community around Ruby. I've been to a bit of a range of conferences recently, and this theme has come up at each one (I find this slightly odd since another theme that usually also crops up is the bashing of a parallel community.) I'm interested in finding out what it is that brings this out. Is it that because these communities are web related so the sharing and community aspects are more easily facilitated? Is it because most of these are around open source technologies?
Jess Newlands's talk ChatOps at GitHub was the talk that gave me the most food for thought. It was about how central chat is to daily workflow at github (using the very nice hubot, in Campfire): for deploys; for communication of everything to everyone; for teaching by doing; for silly gifs (of course).
One of the ideas he emphasised that was especially interesting was:
By placing tools directly in the middle of the conversation, everyone is pairing all of the time.
I'll be digging through the scripts available and thinking about what we could write ourselves (and share) that will make work easier, better, happier, or all three.